An epic win for my beloved Dodgers
Wikimedia Commons photo
When my time comes, if there is some gathering for people to pick over my days and ways, I expect someone will inevitably say, “That old boy loved baseball and would bore you silly talking about the damned Dodgers.
How many times did he tell you that a baseball season was like an epic novel? Or whine about losing that 1978 World Series against the Yankees? And the funniest part is that he couldn’t play the game, not a lick.”
They’re right, these grievers griping over my dead body. I love baseball — and those Dodgers especially — as much as I love “The Andy Griffith Show,” another lifelong obsession that will be kicked around by mourners, several of whom had to endure my reenactment of certain scenes from the show (“Did he ever make you sit through his Ernest T. Bass medley?”).
It is true that I could not play baseball at all, not even a little bit, not a lick. I played baseball like Barney Fife sang. For all I know, the team may have scheduled secret practices without telling me.
It seemed that the worse I got at the game, the more I loved it. As a kid, I used every cent of my allowance to buy baseball cards, eventually accumulating hundreds and hundreds of them. I kept the Dodgers cards separate, in one of my grandpa’s cigar boxes.
During the season, I followed the box scores every day in the paper, memorizing statistics and monitoring the standings, trying to will the Dodgers to the top of the National League West.
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I could name every player on the team, even the bench guys. I wore my Dodgers baseball cap everywhere, even school, until my teachers made me take it off. At night, I’d listen to the Atlanta Braves radio broadcasts, especially if they were playing the Dodgers.
During the offseason, I could hardly stand the wait until the winter meetings, when the general managers for all the teams in the Major League would meet and make trades, all trying to improve their teams. There was nothing I loved more than a blockbuster trade, when the Dodgers added exciting new players to the roster.
Yes, baseball IS like an epic novel! There are so many plot twists, heroes and villains, ridiculous contrivances, bitter disappointments, unresolved conflicts, and crisis points. The good guy doesn’t always win. Sometimes the bad guy does. Sometimes, even the Yankees do. It’s not fair, but that’s why it is epic. There is so much to endure, to relish, to overcome.
I have a dogged little group of fellow Dodger fans — think of us as a book club — and every year, we “read” the season together, commiserating over slumps and injuries and decisions made by the manager or the front office, texting every night the team is playing, even in the preseason but especially in the postseason, when every pitch, every at bat, is analyzed, debated, and marveled over.
In this season’s novel, well before the season actually began, the Dodgers added a thrilling new protagonist, Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, to the narrative. Critics wondered whether he would be worth the unimaginable contract he had signed, while others dreamed of him hitting a grand slam to win the World Series.
I bought tickets to see the Dodgers play two games during Memorial Day weekend against the Reds in Cincinnati. Unfortunately, that chapter in the novel was pretty lousy. The Dodgers lost both games, even the one pitched by Walker Buehler, their former ace trying — and apparently failing — to recover from his second Tommy John surgery.
“He’s done,” I told Tammy after he had surrendered about seven earned runs in three innings. “He’s toast. He’s just not the same guy anymore.”
The Dodgers eventually came out of the slump and ended up with the best record in baseball, despite limping into the playoffs with their injury-riddled pitching rotation in shambles. Down two games to one against San Diego in the first round of the playoffs, they were one game from elimination and had to survive a bullpen game during which the team used seven different pitchers to shut out the Padres. And then they shut them out again in game five to advance.
After vanquishing the New York Mets in six games to win the pennant, the Dodgers faced those damned Yankees once again in the World Series. I had read this book before, several times.
Forty-six years ago, when I was a skinny sophomore in high school, the Dodgers played the Yankees in the World Series. After they won the first two games, I presented my Yankee-loving algebra teacher — who also happened to be the varsity baseball coach — some crying towels prior to class.
Have I mentioned the danger of hubris? How some characters, whether they are in the novel or merely reading it, are in need of a serious comeuppance?
The Yankees won the next four games and the Dodgers lost the World Series, shattering my heart and making the rest of that year in algebra class a pure delight.
So when the Dodgers won the first two games of this year’s World Series against the Yankees and there were some whispers in our little club of a possible sweep, I said, “Stop it right now before I give you some algebra problems to solve.”
Indeed, the Dodgers did stumble, and when the Yankees went up 5-0 in game five, that old feeling of dread began to set in, the gloominess of an Edgar Allan Poe story. But then the Yankees inexplicably imploded, committing three little league errors in the fifth inning, allowing the Dodgers to tie the game and eventually take the lead.
Then, in the ninth inning, with the Dodgers ahead by a single, slender run, they turned to Walker Buehler to clinch it. Observant readers will remember my declaration that Buehler’s career was over many chapters earlier, but here he was, the protagonist trying to slay the dragon.
At my wake, I hope somebody says, “When Buehler got that third out, that old boy and his wife jumped around for 15 minutes, whooping and hollering like a bunch of kids. He never did grow up, but he sure did love those Dodgers.”
(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Haywood County. His columns can be found on Substack at substack.com/@chriscox2.)
